Tim Collard is a retired British diplomat who spent most of his career in China and Germany. He is an active member of the Labour Party.

Let’s not pretend we will achieve anything on May 6

Well, nobody’s going to beat that for least surprising news headline of the year. Election on May 6 – you don’t say! And now we’ve all got to find something interesting to say about it. If I don’t succeed, you’ll have to admit it was a tall order, and that no-one else has had much success either. And don’t worry – I’ll refrain from posting a straight Labour party-political on Telegraph blogs, entertaining though the apoplectic responses to those always are.

Given the rather anti-climactic nature of today’s announcement, it might be more appropriate at this stage to call for a general deflation of hyperbole. How much is there really worth getting worked up about? It’s not going to be a huge popular groundswell, like 1945, 1983 or 1997. It’s going to come down to the hard-fought marginals. And what will the outcome really change? Insofar as there is a deep well of resentment against the current government, David Cameron is not sticking his bucket very far down it. No swingeing cuts in either taxes or spending, just a different sort of mood music. From the minimal differences between the three main party programmes, you’d guess we were all pretty well content with the status quo.

Well, perhaps we are. Perhaps all the ranting about the disastrous state of the country is just so much froth and bubble. Perhaps people only get so upset about minor changes in taxation or whatever because by and large they haven’t really got that much to kvetch about. The business of life – both the noble and the seedy bits – seems to carry on much as it always has. To quote the best and greatest of Tories, Dr Samuel Johnson, “How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”

I, for instance, have undergone a dramatic collapse in my finances in the last few years, from fairly comfortable to quasi-Zimbabwean. This is entirely due to my inability to keep a marriage going, and I can’t blame it on the Government. And it helps me get the outside world into some sort of perspective; if people say the country is effectively bankrupt and has sustained an unsustainable amount of debt, then I reflect that the same is true of myself, and I still manage somehow. We will build this supposedly dire economic situation into the pattern of our lives, and the earth will continue to go round the sun. And you can be sure that whoever is Prime Minister on May 7 won’t change very much: our tendency to demand state spending without being prepared to pay the requisite taxes is far too deeply ingrained.

And then the question of why one casts one’s vote. Let’s not pretend we’re achieving anything we’re not by putting our cross in the box, or that it’s some kind of dramatic gesture, visible to God if to nobody else. It’s fairly straightforward: vote Labour if you think the present lot, flawed but at least battle-hardened, are the best bet to steer the ship through the current difficult waters; vote Tory if you think it would be better to hand the whole shebang over to a couple of rich kids with no experience of anything; vote Lib Dem if you want something different but don’t quite know what, and want to give Vince Cable a crack at being Chancellor; or vote for one of the others if you want to make a histrionic gesture or, more reasonably, if you want to build a fringe party a halfway decent platform from which to fight the next election but two. There’s nothing else to argue about. The last word lies with the electorate, we all have one vote each, and we’ll find out what that word is in the early hours of May 7; and for good or ill we’ll all have to live with it.